My as-yet-unpublished novels include one historical fiction novel, as well as two commercial fiction novels.
An Indivisible Past
My historical fiction novel manuscript, ‘An Indivisible Past’ (formerly titled ‘The Taste of Red Dust’) won a mentorship in the Australian Society of Authors and Copyright Agency 2020 Award Mentorship Program for Writers and Illustrators, was selected by the Fellowship of Australian Writers WA for a place in the Four Centres Emerging Writers Program 2018-2020 in collaboration with Fremantle Press and was longlisted for the 2017 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers.
What if attempts to rectify a massive wrong cause more harm?
Miss Evelyn Houghton, an English migrant in her fifties, comes to teach in Ejanding, a WA Wheatbelt town, in 1953.
She hopes to start afresh after leaving a prestigious Perth school following a confrontation with the headmaster over the treatment of one of her pupils.
Instead, she finds herself in a community festering with its own secrets. As she intervenes to try to help another child, her past actions are exposed and she has to face the consequences.
The Shadows We Cast
Sarah and Emma are two everyday women, who often don’t see eye to eye.
Sarah at sixty is coming to terms with life after her husband has left her for a much younger woman.
Her daughter Emma is dealing with her father’s infidelity and her own marriage breaking down.
As they each struggle to deal with the changes in their lives and their relationships, life deals them an even crueller blow.
How will they cope and will it heal the rift between them or drive them further apart?
Woven Interludes
Three women and one man are all booked on the same afternoon to see their doctor.
Erica is in her late fifties and is attending for the results of tests on a breast lump.
Sophie is a nineteen-year-old studying music at University, seeking the pill.
Lizzie is in her forties and caring for her two young children, one of whom is unwell, and for her mother who has dementia, while her husband works away on the mines.
Jim is a retiree with a tennis injury.
Their paths continue to cross, interweave and intensify in the way that life invariably, but often surprisingly, does.
© 2018 Jacquie Garton-Smith (updated 2021)
Jacquie Garton-Smith 